I’m baffled by your comment. This wouldn’t benefit the government at all. They just want their money and wouldn’t want to collapse a major American enterprise over money they will collect by any means necessary.

It's just a classic social media hot take with no thought behind it, designed to get that instant sweet dopamine from upvotes rather than advance the discussion.

30 years of the web and we still haven't worked out how to discourage this (HN does a better job than most though)

It's a sign of people's discontent with corporation blatantly avoiding laws - especially taxation - when they get punished due to smallest mistakes.

Hiding it from online discourse does not change that.

I'm not disputing it that it's completely useless to do so online.

I read it as simple satire.

(Not simple in a judgmental sense, just, as plain old satire.)

>designed to get that instant sweet dopamine from upvotes

I made a simple comment along the same lines in some other thread some time ago, and got nothing but downvotes.

>It's just a classic social media hot take with no thought behind it

Said the pot to the kettle /s

>It's a sign of people's discontent with corporation blatantly avoiding laws - especially taxation - when they get punished due to smallest mistakes.

+1 to this. Did you know that PG&E (California energy utility) is a convicted felon? It's meaningless to them.

"The company was placed on probation in 2017 when it was convicted of six felony crimes connected to one of its natural gas pipelines that exploded in 2010, killing eight people. Since a company can’t go to prison for committing a crime, PG&E faced a $3 million fine and the maximum length of probation. "[0] [emphasis added]

[0]https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/24/22899095/pge-menace-calif...

It might encourage other companies to pay their taxes though.

Why would it? The people who made the decision not to pay are the executives not the shareholders. It's the same situation as if you ask if you can borrow 10 dollars so I lend you 10 dollars, then you don't pay your taxes and they put me in jail for it.

By all means hold executives accountable. If some of them did criminal things they should face criminal consequences - I'm all for that. Up to and including jail time. But sending shareholders to jail for something a company does is crazy unless they are also somehow complicit in it.

> I’m baffled by your comment. This wouldn’t benefit the government at all. They just want their money and wouldn’t want to collapse a major American enterprise over money they will collect by any means necessary.

Ah America the land of rule of law*

*Only enforced if small and/or poor, wealthy and powerful only need to give Government their cut("fine") and no one is held accountable(often even without admitting any wrongdoing). It's rotting the justice system because people see this and no longer care to abide by any of them(cops won't catch vast majority of criminals, for various reasons so fear of punishment isn't a thing). Including cops that have no obligation to enforce any laws, and they don't, so they can play Pokémon Go in peace(but they can break your rights as long they don't know it's a right and it's not widely enforced by courts).

1. Corporations aren't people in every possible sense. Consider most of what you might read random sources say on the internet about corporate personhood to be probably nonsense.

2. Shareholders aren't officers (in the general case), so won't have been part of the decision-making or execution processes that led to this fraud (if that's what it is). So my understanding is they can be deemed to have been "unjustly enriched" by it (and so have stuff taken away from them that they shouldn't have) but can't be held personally liable in the sense that they would be jailed. To do that would be grossly unfair.

Consider that the biggest shareholders of any major corporation are going to be pension funds and the like. So you've got say the California State Teachers Pension (Picking one at random to be specific). You think they should go to jail because their mandate says they have to track the S&P500 to within some % and so they bought MSFT because it's part of the S&P500?